Second Thoughts About Stun Guns

The Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court (“SJC”) recently declared that the Commonwealth’s statutory ban on stun guns violates the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The SJC had previously upheld the statute against constitutional challenge in Commonwealth v. Caetano, but the reasoning behind this holding was rejected in a brief per curium opinion by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2016. However, the guidance given by the Supreme Court in the Caetano litigation was far from unambiguous: it faulted the SJC’s reasoning without opining on the ultimate question of the ban’s constitutionality, thus leaving open the possibility that the statute could pass constitutional muster under an alternative analytic approach. This essay discusses what such an alternative approach might have looked like. Specifically, I suggest that the SJC could have upheld the statutory ban by emphasizing the relative rarity of stun guns as a preferred means of self-defense not only as a matter of founding era history, but also as a matter of contemporary reality. This sort of analysis would have allowed the SJC to distinguish stun guns from other weapons that have received constitutional protection in other cases, and would have been fully consistent with both the scope and limitations of the right to bear arms under the Supreme Court’s Second Amendment jurisprudence